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en-usSun, 02 Aug 2015 21:24:31 -0400Sun, 02 Aug 2015 21:24:31 -0400The latest news on GoodData from Business Insiderhttp://static3.businessinsider.com/assets/images/bilogo-250x36-wide-rev.pngBusiness Insiderhttp://www.businessinsider.com
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-second-startups-fail-2012-11Why Most People Fail At Launching Their Second Companieshttp://www.businessinsider.com/why-second-startups-fail-2012-11
Tue, 27 Nov 2012 14:21:00 -0500Max Nisen
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/50b4fdd9eab8ea4f09000008-400-300/roman-stanek.jpg" border="0" alt="Roman Stanek" width="400" height="300" /></p><p>For startups, a big part of the battle is becoming visible. It's difficult to grow when nobody knows who you are. Unfortunately, the things that can make you visible, big ideas, big promises, and being a part of a hyped trend can end up being your downfall.&nbsp;</p>
<p>According to <a href="http://www.gooddata.com/">GoodData</a> founder and CEO Roman Stanek, that's an especially big problem for founders that move on to start a second company.</p>
<p>They start to focus on themselves, overrate their own experience, and spend too much time on what Stanek calls the "air wars," on publicity and image rather than actually making something customers want. Here's how Stanek puts it:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">"The second company is harder. Most people fail at their second companies because they believe they have the magic formula. They think 'I will only fix the problems of the first company and the second company will run like it's on autopilot.' But the problem is that the environment is always different.&nbsp;</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">One of the takeaways from my second company is that there's a clear distinction between what I would call air wars and ground wars. The air wars are talking to analysts going on speaking trips and so on. The ground wars are selling stuff to your customers and solving a real problem. Every company has to do both. The air wars help to build the brand. The ground wars help you win customers. <strong>Most failed startups mix those two up.</strong> <strong>They are selling air wars to their customers, they are selling big hype and big promises and customers are not interested. From a customer's perspective, you always look at what's the value? What do I get today and how does it help me run my business?</strong></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">We have to be strong in the air wars, we have to do PR, we have to have to seek coverage, but at the end of the day it's a good product, it's good salespeople, it's the features and so on that actually win.</p>
<p>You have to go out there and sell your product. But its essential to remember that visibility isn't a goal in itself. It's a way to help customers find you. If you don't have something that they actually need, they're not going to stay.</p>
<p><strong>NOW READ: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/raising-money-during-lehman-collapse-2012-11">What It Was Like Trying To Raise Money The Day Lehman Brothers Collapsed&nbsp;</a></strong></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/why-second-startups-fail-2012-11#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/raising-money-during-lehman-collapse-2012-11What It Was Like Trying To Raise Money The Day Lehman Brothers Collapsedhttp://www.businessinsider.com/raising-money-during-lehman-collapse-2012-11
Tue, 20 Nov 2012 19:49:36 -0500Max Nisen
<p class="p1"><img style="float:right;" src="http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/50abe5a8eab8ea7d0e000003-400-300/roman-stanek.jpg" border="0" alt="Roman Stanek" width="400" height="300" /></p><p>One of the essential ingredients for a startup <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/what-it-takes-for-a-startup-to-succeed-2012-11">is timing</a>.</p>
<p class="p1"><a href="http://www.gooddata.com/">GoodData</a> CEO Roman Stanek knows that particularly well, having <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/what-it-takes-for-a-startup-to-succeed-2012-11">started his first major company</a> just as the Internet bubble started, and sold it in 1999.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">But when it came to his most recent company, the timing was slightly less auspicious, at least at first. Stanek arrived in New York to ask for funding on the very day that <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/lehman-brothers-1">Lehman Brothers</a> collapsed.&nbsp;"So for <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/gooddata">GoodData</a>, I landed in New York on September 15, 2008 and I came here to raise money, I came from Boston, I opened a newspaper and it said 'Lehman Brothers failed' and I was like, 'OK, here it comes.'"</p>
<p class="p2">That began a period for the company where it was all but impossible to get funding. "I&nbsp;went to VCs and they said, 'we are not funding anybody,'" Stanek says, "and here's the reason why. Imagine that as a VC, let's say you have $100 million, you have ten companies and each one of them needs $20 million. But you can assume that you will syndicate, so $100 million plus $100 million from somebody else will get you into a good place."</p>
<p class="p2">Then came the financial crisis. Stanek says, "What happened in 2008 is that the whole notion of syndication went away, everybody was trying to protect their own portfolio. So now you have $100 million and 10 companies, those companies need $200 million so what do you do? You have to eliminate half of your portfolio. ...That's the moment I showed up."</p>
<p class="p2">It was not a hugely receptive audience; they had bigger problems at the time. "These people, they don't know where their money is," Stanek says. "It could be parked with Lehman Brothers, so they don't even know where it is."</p>
<p class="p2">The result was a seven-month "VC no," a phenomenon where funds, rather than telling you "no" outright and burning a bridge, just never get back to you.</p>
<p class="p2">Stanek and GoodData got a different stall tactic. "The other way VCs delay their decision is, and that's what happened to us, is they ask you to do technical due diligence," Stanek says. "They take you through six months of testing and they essentially do it just to delay the decision, they know they've made the decision from day one."</p>
<p class="p2">But admitting failure wasn't an option, Stanek argues. "For me, to go back to my team and my existing investors and say, we're accepting defeat, we're not raising money because it's impossible, that means that you have a problem and you may lose employees and so on. ... I kept going, I kept trying."</p>
<p class="p2">Eventually, Stanek succeeded, getting investors like Mark Andreesen and <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/ben-horowitz">Ben Horowitz</a> on board.</p>
<p class="p2">He argues that the process actually made his company stronger in the long run, that the timing was actually right on. "It was very painful, but what it also did, it allowed us to start at a time when nobody else was starting," Stanek says. "I would hate to start today when, every day, Y-Combinator and 500 kinds of seed companies are spitting out startups, you have no differentiation. It's much harder today."&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p2"><strong>NOW READ: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/what-it-takes-for-a-startup-to-succeed-2012-11">This Photo Illustrates How Hard It Is For A Startup To Succeed</a></strong></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/raising-money-during-lehman-collapse-2012-11#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/what-it-takes-for-a-startup-to-succeed-2012-11This Photo Illustrates How Hard It Is For A Startup To Succeedhttp://www.businessinsider.com/what-it-takes-for-a-startup-to-succeed-2012-11
Sat, 17 Nov 2012 23:27:00 -0500Max Nisen
<p>A great idea and hard work are obviously essential for startups. Even more important? Timing.</p>
<p>We recently spoke to Roman Stanek, the founder and CEO of <a href="http://www.gooddata.com/">GoodData</a>, who previously sold NetBeans to <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/sun-microsystems" class="hidden_link">Sun Microsystems</a> in 1999, and Systinet to Mercury Software/Hewlett Packard in 2006.&nbsp;</p>
<p>His first company succeeded because he was able to act as a gatekeeper for American software coming into Eastern Europe as his native Czechoslovakia came out from under communist rule. Netbeans sold the right kind of software just as the internet was becoming widely used.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1" style="padding-left: 30px;">"At the end of the day, I was lucky with the timing. '97, '95, you know the first bubble. That put me on the map."</p>
<p class="p1" style="padding-left: 30px;">Communism ended at the right time, and then the internet came at the right time?&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1" style="padding-left: 30px;">"It's always like that. You look at any successful company, you always find a piece of luck. That's the last piece that makes it perfect. You have to have all of that hard work and all of that preparation and so on, and that gets you to the point where you can leverage it."</p>
<p class="p1">Roman illustrated the point perfectly with the story of how he took the below photo.</p>
<p class="p1" style="padding-left: 30px;">"Photography, it's luck, isn't it? The right light and so on. I was taking pictures of a rowing competition. As I was standing there, one of the rowers actually looked up at me while I was on a bridge. If she looked one second earlier or one second later, how do you stage that? And this was a race, she was not supposed to look up, she was supposed to be racing.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1" style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>It was timing. It was luck. It was also me being there with a good camera, with the right light, all of that preparation, then the simple fact that she actually looked up at me. That's the last piece, that's the piece that separates the good from excellent.</strong></p>
<p class="p1" style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>That's true for every startup, every successful company</strong> &mdash; look at Netcape, Mark Andreesen &mdash; you always find that timing, that they looked at it at exactly the month they were supposed to. You look at <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/facebook" class="hidden_link">Facebook</a>, all of those things that happened exactly at the right time, and people before them and after them failed because they didn't have the right timing.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1" style="padding-left: 30px;">It's the last 5 percent. The rest of it is effort."&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">Still, the importance of that last 5 percent can't be overstated.</p>
<p class="p1">Stanek gave the example of Facebook. The idea was great, as was the execution. But the timing was what made it a multi billion dollar company, because the company grew incredibly at the same time as a massive change in the way people thought and cared about privacy and sharing information on the internet. Other companies did the earliest, hardest work changing people's perceptions, and Facebook was in the right place to take full advantage.&nbsp;</p>
<p><img src="http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/50a51037eab8eaad2d00001a-2000-1333/timing.jpg?maxX=940" border="0" alt="Timing" width="940" /></p>
<p><strong>NOW READ: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-size-penalty-for-big-corporations-2012-11">Why Startups Will Keep Disrupting Big Companies</a></strong></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/what-it-takes-for-a-startup-to-succeed-2012-11#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/gooddata-2011-8Anybody Can Build A Consumer Startup, But Selling To Enterprises "Separates The Men From The Boys"http://www.businessinsider.com/gooddata-2011-8
Thu, 18 Aug 2011 11:00:00 -0400Matt Rosoff
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/4e4ca26f6bb3f7fc56000021/gooddata-ceo-roman-stanek.jpg" border="0" alt="GoodData CEO Roman Stanek" /></p><p></p>
<p><a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/gooddata">GoodData</a>, which is trying to upend the multibillion-dollar business intelligence market, just raised a $15 million Series B round led by Silicon Valley VC firm <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/andreessen-horowitz">Andreessen Horowitz</a>.&nbsp;</p>
<p>A partner from the firm, John O'Farrell, has also joined GoodData's board, along with <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/google-calls-microsoft-cloud-strategy-a-filibuster-2010-10">Dave Girouard</a>, who heads up Google's enterprise business.</p>
<p>Business intelligence products help companies make sense of their data. The market is dominated today by Business Objects, Cognos (both billion-dollar companies) and Hyperion (a half-billion-dollar company), and enterprise powerhouses like <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/oracle">Oracle</a> and <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/microsoft">Microsoft</a> also play in the space.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gooddata.com/">GoodData</a> is going up against these giants with its cloud-based BI platform, which is much cheaper and faster to deploy -- <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/gooddata">GoodData</a> CEO <a href="http://www.gooddata.com/about/romans-vision">Roman Stanek</a> says "our deals take usually four to six weeks to close, and another four to six weeks to implement." A typical BI solution can take up to a year.</p>
<p>A large part of that quick 'time-to-value" comes from <a href="http://www.gooddata.com/apps">GoodData's apps</a>, which plug right into other services and let customers analyze data from them -- like customer data stored in <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/salesforce">Salesforce</a>, user data amassed from <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/facebook">Facebook</a> users, or call data from <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/twilio">Twilio</a>.&nbsp;</p>
<p>But to sell the product effectively, <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/gooddata">GoodData</a> needs a direct sales force capable of going up against the giants in IT departments. That's a lot more complicated and expensive than the customer-acquisition process for consumer startups, which can rely on viral marketing and word-of mouth -- and that's what a lot of the new round is going to fund.</p>
<p>As O'Farrell puts it, selling to enterprises "definitely separates the men from the boys."</p>
<p>"Enterprise customers are demanding and conservative -- and they should be. They're being asked to implement a product that will interface with their other apps in real time, and form the basis for critical business decisions."</p>
<p>But O'Farrell has a lot of confidence in the product and the team, and <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/gooddata">GoodData</a> has already amassed 100 direct customers (it also has more than 2,500 customers through partners) and is showing the kind of hockey-stick growth that investors like -- in July, more than 2 million business intelligence reports were executed on GoodData's platform which is five times as many as were done in January.</p>
<p>Most important, <a class="hidden_link" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/andreessen-horowitz">Andreessen Horowitz</a> likes billion-dollar business areas that it feels are ripe for disruption, and BI is one of the last areas where cloud computing and software as a service has yet to take off.</p>
<p>As O'Farrell puts it, "we're focused on the best companies that we believe can break out and earn $1 billion in annual revenue, and have a big impact on the world."</p>
<p><strong>See Also: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/exclusive-qa-john-ofarrell-explains-why-andreessen-horowitz-is-different-from-other-vc-firms-2011-2">Our Q&amp;A With John O'Farrell</a></strong></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/gooddata-2011-8#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p>